U of Illinois chancellor brings wide-ranging experience

Published 7:39 pm, Saturday, July 30, 2016

URBANA, Ill. (AP) — The newly appointed leader of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has had extensive personal and professional experiences that include growing up in a segregated city, recording a song with Stevie Wonder and working with Nobel Prize winner Desmond Tutu.

Robert Jones, 65, was approved as the university’s next chancellor July 21, the News-Gazette reported.

Jones, who grew up as the son of a sharecropper in Dawson, Georgia, said education changed his life. He said he and his siblings began picking cotton and peanuts at the farm at a young age and that he is fortunate his parents highly valued education.

“We knew the potential was there, given the opportunity, for him to do whatever he put his mind to do,” said Mary Alice Browner, his sister. “He’s always been a go-getter.”

Jones went to Fort Valley State University and later earned a master’s in crop physiology from the University of Georgia. He completed his Ph.D. at the University of Missouri, where he worked with renowned plant physiologist C.J. Nelson.

“That is where I learned how to be a research professor, under his tutelage,” Jones said. “He transformed my life the same way my vocational ag professor did.”

Jones was recruited by the University of Minnesota while he was still finishing his Ph.D. and joined the faculty in June 1978 to start a new program in crop physiology as an assistant professor of agronomy and plant genetics.

Jones was an established researcher when plant physiologist Fred Below joined the University of Illinois faculty in 1985.

“His papers are widely cited,” Below said. “I use them in my teaching, my own research. To me, it was a sad day when he went into administration — although I’m not as sad about it now.”

Jones said he wasn’t interested in administrative work until he got a call in 1986 from the president’s office, asking him to sit on a strategic planning committee.

He was later asked to be an associate vice president overseeing diversity efforts, the first of several administrative positions he held at Minnesota before leaving to become president of the University of Albany in New York three years ago. He shut down his research lab in 2010.

“Slowly, I began to realize that I received the same amount of satisfaction in making a tenure decision that transforms someone’s life, or approving a seed grant proposal that allowed a new assistant professor to rapidly move through the tenure promotion process, or working with the community to transform and address some of the real complex issues that face our society,” Jones said.

Jones, who will be the university’s first African-American chancellor, is scheduled to begin his duties Oct. 3.